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The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case |
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A City Possessed: At the end of March
1992, when I heard about the arrest of Peter Ellis on a number of charges
relating to the sexual abuse of children, I breathed a sigh of relief. Since
coming to So when I heard that a man named Ellis had been arrested
for paedophilia I thought, "Good job!" - the porn ring had finally
been cracked. There were no accomplices identified, but six months later I
was not surprised to read that four more crèche workers had been charged as
well. I was taken aback that the alleged accomplices were women - I had
expected men - and I was intrigued when the charges against the women were
suddenly dropped with no change to Ellis's situation. I therefore watched the
trial's progress carefully, reported in detail each day by Press journalist,
Martin van Beynen. By trial's end, my opinion had changed. I could not
understand how the charges had been laid in the first place. The children had
disclosed nothing when initially spoken to and when they began to talk, after
months of badgering from parents and therapists, much of what they said was
nonsensical childish whimsy. No behavioural problems had been noticed during
the period of alleged abuse, no abused children had complained of anything at
the time, most of the alleged activity had occurred at a busy, open-plan,
crèche without any adults seeing anything, and there was no medical evidence
or physical evidence to support any of the charges. It was plain that the
evidence against Ellis was completely unreliable and I seriously doubted
whether anything had taken place at all. Yet Ellis was convicted on 16 counts
involving seven children and sentenced to ten years in prison. How on earth could this have happened? As I learned more
about the case and got to know some of those involved I began to understand,
but for years those of us with an interest in the matter awaited elucidation
from the book that we knew a For seven years Lynley Hood, author of an award-winning
book on Sylvia Ashton-Warner and another on executed baby-farmer Minnie Dean,
researched the Peter Ellis affair. Her investigation required her to not only
investigate the facts of the case itself, but also the backgrounds of the
principal characters within it. And in order to explain how these factors
operated, she had to become conversant with aspects of psychology,
psychiatry, sociology and law, as well as with the historical processes that
led to the current situation. Finally, having untangled and examined the
numerous threads that make up the Peter Ellis story, she had to weave them
into a comprehensible and readable format. The result is nothing less than outstanding; an
encyclopaedic work of professorial quality. Hood's 616-page treatment is a
compelling authority; an opus so deep, detailed, insightful and
comprehensive, that nobody could now be said to have an informed opinion
about the case without having read her book. Hood begins by reviewing the
rise of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, and showing how, after moderate
women began leaving at the end of the seventies, the movement became hijacked
by radicals and lesbians with an anti-male agenda. Having concocted false and
alarmist figures about rates of child sexual abuse by men, certain women
managed to convince the Having worked at the Christchurch Civic Crèche since 1986,
Peter Ellis didn't move. He loved his job and he enjoyed playing and
skylarking with the kids at his work, blissfully unaware of the risks he was
taking. As Hood tells it, once the ritual abuse craze commenced in
childcare facilities overseas in the early 1980s, it was inevitable that it
would find its way to So although he had no way of knowing it, from the moment
he began working at the Civic Crèche, Ellis was a fated man. The initial suspicion commenced following a number of
visits to Once the panic started children refusing to disclose were
harassed repeatedly by investigators, who refused to leave the children alone
until they began to talk in the way
that was required. If the kids said nothing happened, they weren't believed;
if they said they didn't know, they weren't believed; if they said they had
made their stories up, they weren't believed. Bit by bit, the children with
parents who allowed multiple interviewing fell into line, making more
extreme, contradictory and preposterous allegations as time went on. And the
more extraordinary the children's claims, the more frenetic the parents and
investigators became. The final outcome was a litany of the strangest things
that kids whose minds have been polluted by incessant dirty talk and leading
questioning, can think of. They said, inter alia, that Peter, often with
others, kicked them in the kneecaps, danced around naked, kept a giraffe in
his house, put his penis, sticks, food and burning paper up their bums, made
them drink wees, did poos in the bath, did poos in their faces, did wees on
their heads, did wees in their mouths, put his penis in their mouths, killed
a little boy, and dug up Jesus. The interview transcripts provided by Hood make it clear
that the kids didn't really know what had or hadn't happened, or what they
were supposed to say. They contradicted themselves, they couldn't remember
what they'd said before, they changed their minds almost randomly, they said
their mothers had told them what had I happened, and they said they wanted to
go home. None of the hundreds of crèche children who were not subjected to
multiple interviews and parental harassment, spoke of any of these things.
Nor did any of the complainant children, before the interrogations began. And
nobody noticed any of these things at the time, happening right under their noses. Yet none of the
psychiatrists, nor the social workers, nor the police who were involved in
the case, appear to have seriously considered the possibility that the
children's tales were complete, adult-driven, fantasy. Even the trial judge,
who, on the grounds of "relevancy", allowed the jury only to hear
the most credible parts of the children's testimony, was convinced that Ellis
was guilty. So, apparently were the majority of judges who were involved in
the case throughout the appeals process. Their rigid commitment has not been
swayed by the retraction of the oldest and most compelling of the child witnesses,
who now says that she made up her stories of abuse because she thought that
was what her parents wanted. For Ellis to have done the things he was convicted of,
over a period of years, without a child saying anything and without anybody
noticing, he would have had to have been a magician or a sorcerer. But that
was no problem for the prosecution team. In a process chillingly reminiscent
of the witch trials of Renaissance Europe, they believed the substance of the
allegations, they overlooked the impossibilities and absurdities within them,
and they prosecuted Ellis with the greatest possible vigour. As the net
slowly closed around this victim, there was no way out for him. Tightly
ensnared, Ellis was hauled before a court of law, judged by a jury with only
a fraction of the facts in front of it, and sentenced to a decade in prison.
He never stood a chance. Mother Theresa would not have escaped. As Hood notes in the final chapter of her book, the
failure of the High Court, two appeal benches, and a ministerial inquiry to
provide a remedy in what is becoming recognised as New Zealand's most
disgraceful judicial travesty, speaks loudly of a need, not only for a
full-blown commission of inquiry into the case of Peter Ellis, but of the
whole system that allowed the madness to happen and be sustained. Throughout
the appeals he remained in prison, and, after twice being denied parole, was
discharged upon completion of his sentence in February 2000. Today, Ellis stands as guilty as he was judged in 1993 and
his appeal avenues have virtually been exhausted. A judicial pardon remains
his only realistic option. This remedy has rarely been used, most notably in
the double murder case of Arthur Allan Thomas in 1979. Like Ellis, Thomas
spent years in prison while the process of justice failed him. Finally, it
was the publication of three books on the case that convinced the Prime
Minister, Robert Muldoon, to set up yet another investigation and on the
basis of this, Thomas was pardoned. A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the
case chaired, significantly, not by a But the Ellis case is different from Thomas, because Ellis
lacks government support. The Minister
of Justice has declared he is satisfied with the outcome of the ministerial
inquiry he set up and has wiped his hands of the matter. The Prime Minister
herself has been silent and the complainants' parents are fixed in their
belief that their children have been abused. Any official departure from the
decisions of the courts would invite a shrill response from them. Many are
Labour supporters and the government needs their votes. It was a politician
who saved Arthur Thomas and with Ellis, too, it is politics, not justice,
that is driving the case. For this reason he is unlikely to share Thomas's
good fortune, at least in the short term. Not so, however, the judgment of history. Even now, it
seems, few people believe that Ellis is guilty of anything. Cynical
journalists like Frank Haden, David McLoughlin, Melanie Reid, George Balani,
and Martin van Beynen - the only journalist to have sat right through the
trial - clearly think he is innocent. As more people read Lynley Hood's book,
and learn how Peter Ellis was railroaded into infamy, the injustice of his
case will become increasingly accepted. Like the witches who were burned in
the crazes of the Renaissance, history will judge Peter Ellis to have been
convicted on the basis not of reason, but in a frenzy of blind hysteria and
prejudice. At some point, this may officially be recognised. But at the
moment the judiciary is turning away from the plight of a man impugned by
some of the most absurd testimony ever heard in a Greg Newbold is a senior lecturer in sociology at the |
